To help you get more information about our services, we are opening a new section on our website: Resources. It contains informative material (PDF format) aimed at people in executive positions that a friendly, simple overview of the Syneto products and services.

Right now, it contains two sections:

• The case studies show how various companies implemented Syneto products in real life environments.
• The presentation flyers describe our main services. We also periodically include the quarterly threat report published by our partner Commtouch.

We hope you will find them useful. As always, if you have any suggestions, feel free to let us know what kind of additional material you might need.

To download the documents, go to Support > Resources.

Commtouch, our email security partner, recently released a new trends threat report for the first quarter of 2010. This is an invaluable resource for all of us actively trying to understand the levels of Internet threats, and to assess our most vulnerable points.

Some data from the report:

• 183 billion spam/phishing emails are sent every day
• 305.000 new zombies activated daily
• One particular virus (Mal/Bredo) has no less than 838 variants
• Pornography websites are most likely to be infected with malware

To read more, download the report.
Syneto has a great solution against all email threats. To see how you can secure the company’s network, take a look at our Total Email Protection service.

PS: Commtouch also has a great tool that allows you to determine the threat level of a particular IP. You can find it at this URL: http://www.commtouch.com/check-ip-reputation.

We are very happy to announce the immediate availability of our newest Syneto UTM release: version 1.3.0. We put a great effort into developing it, so we hope you will be pleased with the results.

The main focus of the 1.3.0 release is the email functionality. We received signals from our customers that configuring the email proxy was a little… difficult, so we spent a lot of time to make it easier and usable. We fully redesigned the email configuration pages, united some features, removed unused settings and merged others. The result is a more comprehensible interface that we think you’ll enjoy working with.

Since performance is an ever-growing issue, we took the necessary steps to improve the quality of our engines and the quantity of mail they could process. By partnering with Commtouch, we obtained both. Their global IP reputation engine filters out most of the email by only analyzing the source IP (increased performance), while their antispam/antivirus engines weed out the remaining threats (increased quality).

To top everything off, we implemented new email-related features that you asked for. The email digest sends a daily email message to every person that has quarantined malware, enabling for its easy deletion/retrieval. Enhanced email reporting was added as a way to get a clear picture of the UTM’s function (top senders, top receivers, top blocked IPs etc), and the executive summary functionality allows managers to receive daily reports via email, so that they too can keep track of what is going on inside the network.

See full release notes for 1.3.0 on the knowledge base.

The level of threat that Internet users are exposed to continues to grow each quarter.

Earlier this week, Commtouch released Q4 2009 Internet Threats Trend Report, a 20-page document describing what the reality of Internet security is circa late 2009. Highlights of the document include:

• 312,000 zombies were activated on average each day of the quarter
• Spam levels ranged between 68% (late December) and 98% (in November), averaging at 77% throughout the quarter
• One proficient virus masqueraded in emails coming from Facebook, DHL, UPS, the government etc.
• For a sample malware (Mal-Bredo A), the time difference between it being revealed in the Commtouch security labs and other antivirus vendors was 11.77h (Microsoft), 25.88h (Kaspersky), and even larger than 98h (Symantec, TrendMicro)

If you want to take advantage of Commtouch’s international network of malware detection, one simple answer would be the new Total Email Protection service that accompanies our Syneto UTM, which will be available starting with version 1.3.0 of our product.

Release date: early February 2010.

Seeing as how this is the first post of the year, please allow me to wish all of you a great 2010, may it be better than the year we just ended.

I’ve been really quiet during the last few months, as we’ve been very busy developing, but this time I have some great news to share with you.

October last year we signed a strategic agreement with Commtouch – one of the leading providers of global email and web threat intelligence, with thousands of clients in over 190 countries. What does that mean for the Syneto family of products? It means that the level of detection of our email protection engines gained a great performance boost, effectively transforming us in a top competitor in the email security market.

Why are we announcing this only now? We wanted to wait until we were really close to releasing a product with the new technology incorporated, and that product is the next generation of our Syneto UTM – version 1.3.0, in which we integrated the Commtouch Antispam, Antivirus and IP reputation engines, along with a lot of other great enhancements to our product. I will blog more on the technical details in the following days, but I am sure you will be amazed by the progress we made.

The good news is the new version is pretty close to release, as we are entering the RELEASE CANDIDATE phase at the beginning of next week (January 18th). That means we will be releasing the final version in the first days of February. Meanwhile, if you would like to take part in the evaluation of the RELEASE CANDIDATE, please send me an email at flavius(at)syneto(dot)net and I will gladly help you obtain a copy.

As we announced in an earlier post, we are changing the way our product is documented, and also the way we collaborate with our partners and customers. We are adding 2 new functionalities to our web portal: a knowledge base and a forum.

The Syneto Knowledge Base (http://kb.syneto.net)

We have been listening to your feedback about our PDF manual and decided it was time for a change: from now on, the technical documentation will reside in electronic format in our knowledge base. What does this mean to you?

• Easier search – try searching for PPTP for instance
• Print only what you need – each article has its own print link, so you don’t have to print the whole thing or spend time chasing the page numbers
• Access from anywhere – wherever there is Internet, you get access to the Syneto knowledge
• Help us improve – each article has a “comment” section, where you can tell us if there’s something wrong or missing

The Syneto Forum (http://www.syneto.net/forum/)

We want to start hearing from you: who you are, what great achievements have you accomplished using the Syneto UTM, what problems is it causing or what you would like to see it feature. We even have an “International” section where you are encouraged to use your own mother tongue. Off-topic is also allowed: we really like blonde jokes and links to youtube videos. :)

We really hope you will enjoy our two new features and encourage you to take them for a spin: Syneto Knowledge Base, Syneto Forum.

We are preparing a surprise for you. Next week we’ll be releasing the fruits of an effort to better service the Syneto UTM users. The documentation as you now know it will be history… Think better search, easier findability and ubiquity.

Check back by the website and blog early next week to find out what we have in store for you. In the meantime, have a nice weekend!

Edit: we revealed the surprise in this post.

We are often asked when we think a certain feature or another will be implemented in our Unified Threat Management solution. To address this issue, Syneto decided you all should know what we are working on, so we created a page on the official website called Syneto UTM roadmap. There you can see what we are currently working on and what we are intending to implement in the future releases. Feel free to make suggestions, comments or feature requests by sending mail to contact [at] syneto [dot] net, or by commenting on this page.

Network&Knowledge, one of our business partners, is holding a conference titled Competing during times of economic crisis at the end of this week (4th of April) in Provaglio d’Iseo (BS, Italy).

Syneto has been invited to host a talk related to the increasing role technology plays in securing critical business intelligence data and processes. Our CEO, Mr. Marco Lorenzi will show how Syneto UTM can prevent you from losing money by blocking accidental leakage of confidential data and providing a safe and strongly encrypted environment through which data can flow.

We strongly believe our line of UTM products is a must-have for anyone transiting company related data through a network facing the Internet. Learn why and how we can keep your business intelligence data safe by reserving a place at the conference (limited seating).

Contact us for reservations (marco [at] syneto [dot] net).

Syneto and Techne Security are hosting an event to showcase our UTM technology and present the latest improvements in our rapidly growing networking product. Present on behalf of Syneto will be our CEO Mr. Marco Lorenzi, that will give a brief summary of the current situation aswell as the intentions Syneto has in the networking environment.

For full details, visit Techne Security’s website.

Later edit: Here are a few pictures from our presentation at the Modena event.